I’m a nobody, nobody is perfect, therefore I’m perfect.

With the introduction of lambdas in Java (not so) recently, some argue that Groovy lost some of its thunder, as closures are now first class citizens in the JDK. However, as I’m about to show, while lambda’s pushed the Java language a great deal forward, Groovy still makes a lot of things incredibly easy (and […]

I’m going to spread some lovin’ today for the widely-used yet less appreciated feature in Groovy which allows creating a Java bean and setting its properties in one line. Especially when dealing with unit tests this saves me a great deal of time and frustration. If you ever worked with “pure” (??) Java beans, then […]

This is something that every now and then I have to do: check whether either one or all elements of a collection meet a certain criteria. The standard code initially in Java involved a for loop and iterating through the collection explicitly and checking the condition at each step. Then Apache Commons came on with their […]

I came across this article on Tech Crunch today (AI accountability needs action now, say UK MPs) and wanted to share some thoughts on it. It sounds to me like once again Europe, and UK in this case, is getting cold feet about AI and big data and the interesting results this renders sometimes. Because […]

If you ever programmed in Groovy language, you probably “enjoyed” (maybe without realising) the joys of DefaultGroovyMethods. What you probably don’t realise is that you can override these methods to customize your classes — and occasionally generate some code that’s not that easy to read. (Do you remember the old C++ way of overriding operators […]

Nicolas Fränkel published a blog entry recently talking about “Type-safe annotations” in Java — which trigger my thoughts on the same matter, and voila, there’s this post as a result of it. This is in fact my 2 cents on the matter — and as such I’d recommend you read Nicolas’ point of view too […]

If you use gradle and you took the path to write your own gradle plugins (try it, it’s fun!) to make your build process more … “enjoyable”, then this might come in handy one day. I have worked on a few gradle plugins, some of them inside the Netflix Nebula suite, some of them outside Netflix […]

If you’ve been doing “stuff” with Java 8 for a while I’m sure you’ve stepped into lambdas territory and the joys of succinct code it allows to be written. And if you are like me you probably found yourself using lambda’s everywhere you are confronted with a single-method interface. Which is allowed. In fact it’s […]

With Java 8, Oracle introduced the concept of “default methods” in interfaces (and if you really haven’t heard of this — wtf?? — you can read more here about it: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/defaultmethods.html). This argue some is a step towards multiple inheritance and as such should be banished from the oh, so pure! Java language. Others point out […]

This is a perfect example of how to do advertising the wrong way — and it’s pretty much the reason why most people hate online adverts: when it becomes too aggressive, too in your face, too intrusive and too damn creepy, then of course, any user would want that s**t off the pages they are […]

I have been using for a while the about.me website and their mobile app Intro by about.me. (I use an Android phone, and as such I am supplying here the link to the Google Play appstore, however I’m sure they have an iOS one too you’ll have to search in the App Store for it.) For […]

I was asked recently by a couple of friends on this side of the Atlantic about suggestions regarding London — as they were planning their London trip. I put together an email with basic pointers and sent it to my first friend. Shortly after it turns out another one decides he wants to visit Blighty and […]

I have been following closely the Brexit referendum in the UK — I’m sure it comes as no surprise to those of you who know me. Because I am Romanian. And I am British. And I live in USA. And I care! I have followed the news online and listening to the likes of LBC […]